Suffering in Silence

Relationships, finances, and illnesses top the list of things that cause pain.

We feel the pain when we don’t have enough money to keep our lights on or feed our family. The pain is much more intimate when it is searing through your body. For example, I have an autoimmune disease. I am not sure which one, but the doctor is confident that there is one there. There are days that I wake up and pain is shooting through my body.

Your story may not be very different. There may be days that you wake up and fight through all this pain. It could be a result of chronic illness or age. Whatever the reason the pain is there. It resonates through your body. Is it financial pain? As much of a struggle as that is we can fix that. Better jobs, side jobs, or selling things online can offset that pain. Yet, there is still a pain that happens that cannot be offset by strategy. Ignoring the issue will not change it. It must be dealt with head on.

You know what that pain is?

It is the pain caused by relationships.

There is no other pain that I know of that is as hard as relational. Think about it. When something isn’t right in your relationships you feel it. You feel it in your heart, your emotions, your mind, and ends up in your body. The stress from relational pain can be intense. There is nothing in this world that can compare to someone you love treating you in a negative way.

In future blogs, I will write on how to walk through relational pain.

Today, my purpose in our conversation is going to be a little different.

I know that you have been through your own share of pain. You have experienced a plethora of painful experiences. You may have been molested, raped, abused, or disowned by a family member. Could it be that you had a marriage that failed or children that have walked out on you?

I am not sure about the specific pain you have been through. Yet, I know that you have been through pain. I am also aware that you may be carrying your pain with you. Healing has yet to come. The hurt is still present. Every time you experience a “similar” situation your pain is triggered. These are all real possibilities.

This brings me to my question that I want to ask you.

Have you ever wanted to share your pain, but failed to do so?

<Are you suffering in silence unable to speak about your pain?>

I am not sure when it started. It could have been when I was a child. If I am honest about it this happened right before my dad left. Things in the house were always tense. He was not a good man. Many things happened. Yet, it was around this time that I thought to myself, “If I stay silent than my mom and dad won’t be mad all the time.” Life didn’t happen that way. I stayed silent. Things got worse. He left and I blamed myself.

Throughout the year’s things didn’t improve much. I had been through one trial after another. Most of them were avoidable if I would have said something to the other person. I stayed silent. Suffering in silence I would hold everyone in and let life go on as “normal” as I could. Always silent about the issues. Never brave enough to share the pain of my heart.

To make myself feel better about it I began to believe lies.

Lie #1: I don’t have time for myself I am helping others.

I held onto this lie the most. I had convinced myself that I was the wounded warrior. It didn’t matter how hurt I was. What mattered was that I was helping people. I lost myself in helping people. In my mind helping people was the reason I could keep moving forward. As long as people needed me then I was OK.

I was wrong. Being OK was not what I was. I was the opposite of OK. Immersed in the simplicity of it. Helping others was OK, but helping myself was not.

I even convinced myself that I was selfish if I focused too much on helping myself.

As the years went on, I spent a lot of time helping others. I failed at helping myself. To this day, I struggle with this lie. I have to fight for my health by denouncing this lie. Being healthy is the true way to help others to be healthy.

Lie #2: People will be offended and hurt.

This lie has truth to it. My struggle was that I was afraid to hurt people’s feelings. I didn’t want to offend anyone. The fear of hurting others drove me. It caused me to internalize everything I was feeling. If I was hurt you wouldn’t hear about it. My mind made my heart believe that hurting others was the worst thing that I could do. So I fought very hard not to hurt anyone. That meant that I had to stay silent.

Truth is:

People will be offended. You cannot help that. You can help yourself find healing through speaking up.

<Don’t stay silent. Speak up in Love. >

The lies we believe can be powerful. We must dismantle them one by one.

If a lie continues to exist we it will rule over us. I know that most of us don’t like to hear that. So, it’s time to face the truth and dismantle the lies. The biggest lie that we believe is that we have to suffer in silence. That isn’t true. We don’t have to suffer in silence.

Let me share with you a truth of two that will help you fight that lie.

Truth: You cannot heal what you do not discuss.

Life boils down to connection through conversation. How we interact with one another. The words we use and don’t use. They all matter.

Conversations of couples in love is a beautiful things. It gives and takes. The conversation lifts one another up. Each couple can challenge the other. There is freedom to speak. Most important is the safety they have when they speak. Knowing that they can speak free without fear of reprisal is the great give you can give someone. That is the beauty of connection through conversation.

It is in this setting there is a freedom to share our inner most thoughts. In this atmosphere I can talk about what the problem is. Together we can find a solution. You cannot find a solution for things that are left unsaid. If it isn’t brought up there will not be any solution.

If you are not part of the solution then you are part of the problem.

So let’s make a pact to be problem solvers and not problem creators.

Here is the kicker. When I share my inner most thoughts something powerful happens.

Truth: I am empowered to share more.

The more I share the more I want to share. Once I open the floodgates for positive healing conversations I will want to continue it. When I share I am empowered to share more. A cycle of healing can develop. I have to break my silence and share my heart issues with people I care about. It is an amazing feeling to be able to share my pain in a healthy way. Sharing anything and breaking the silence is the win here.

The opposite is true:

What you bury will turn into bitterness.

I hate that this is a truth. Whatever I don’t share has the potential to become a bitter poison in my soul. It could be avoidable if I would have shared. Yet, my silence has allowed for so much bitterness. I sit here typing these words burdened by the pain I have yet to share. Shackled by own bitterness. Praying that there will be a way to break these chains. The only way I have found: begin talking about it. Open up and share my pain.

It is time for you to be free!

Let me give you 3 encouragements which you will see unpacked in future blogs.

— Learn to find your voice.

It is your voice and the world is desperate to hear it. Even if they don’t know it yet. Learn to find your voice and speak up.

— Realize that the personal isn’t as fragile as you believe.

I am going to talk about this extensively in an upcoming blog. People are not as breakable as you and I believe they are. Most people can handle hard truth given to them in a loving way.

— Don’t be held back by the fear of what “Might” happen.

Avoid the paralyzing fear of “What If” and “Might”, because they will only give you trouble in the end. You will be afraid of the unknown. The unknown wasn’t mean to be feared. It was meant to be explored. Don’t be caught in the slippery slope of what “might” happen.

NEXT STEPS

I would love for you to do a few things for me 🙂

#1. I love it when people share their thoughts.

I am eager to hear how you have helped someone through this? Please honor me by commenting below! I look forward to engaging you through them!

#2. Would you consider sharing these retweets as well as sharing the article?

[bctt tweet=” If you are not part of the solution then you are part of the problem. #problemsolvers” username=”Jim_burgoon”]
[bctt tweet=” The lies we believe can be powerful. We must dismantle them one by one. #tearitdown” username=”jim_burgoon”]
[bctt tweet=” It is your voice and the world is desperate to hear it. Even if they don’t know it yet. Learn to find your voice and speak up.” username=”Jim_burgoon”]

I believe with the idea of dismantling the lies. Lies are not true, but they’re powerful, in a way that theyr ruin trust between the two people. There must be powerful to dismantle the lies, as long as these two people have wide understanding and strong love to each other.

Coming from someone else that has depression and has 2 teenage daughters with depression, Silence is NOT always golden. Depression can also take many different forms, effecting people in different ways. To this day, I’ve been through Hades and back. Right now, I am only at the point of being around my husband and my children. I do have one exception, my uncle. I wish a lot more people out there would open their eyes and realize that just because we look normal on the outside, it doesn’t mean we are on the inside.

I was never one to talk about things that bothered me, and truthfully I’d been very blessed. Then things imploded in my life all at once, and I told about ten people, lol, some of them strangers. It didn’t help. It left me embarrassed later because some were just people I ‘knew’ online. I guess when you get overwhelmed you have this urge to get it off your chest, even if it takes a few times to do it. 🙂

There is so much of this that resonates in my life that its hard to unpack. I remember in the middle of my failing marriage looking at my mother and telling her, what else could I do? I didn’t want to hurt anyone. And I felt like everything was being left on my plate. And it collapsed anyway, even when I was doing everything in the marriage. You need a place for you. And you need to be able to speak out. I know that now.

Sometimes I don’t know how to deal with pain. Because whenever I open my mouth, it usually makes things worse than before. So I just usually keep it to myself and it makes me numb. But I am learning to handle pain better now.

We can say anything if we say it right. I have found that when have conditioned ourselves to hold pain in we are setting ourselves up for something dangerous. All that pain will have to go somewhere. When it is released there will be no stopping it. I pray it won’t be released on the wrong person. However, if we continually work on the issue and learn how to communicate then we can walk through it! Let me know how I can serve you.

Beautiful post. I always think it’s so interesting how the simple act of putting stuff out there can sometimes be the most healing element. Like just talking about it can make you see it in a different light then just letting it brew inside of you.

If you keep something in the dark you give it power over you. If you share it in the light the darkness has to flee. We don’t have but one life to live and that life must be lived out loud. Thank you for sharing!

We often think that it would be so much better to just keep quiet. But it’s never okay to bottle things up especially when you’re in a relationship. It’s going to be toxic and it’s also going to make it more painful for you.

Putting people first, and believing that that was what kept me going, was a huge thing I had to overcome in the past. I’m glad that I’ve been able to move past this and understand that it’s okay to put yourself first sometimes. Great article.

“The lies we believe can be powerful. We must dismantle them one by one.”

This statement is very very true. I call this belief system. You tend to believe what others say about you because you hear it from them over and over. You can fix this by repeating positive things about you everytime you wake up.

So true! I think that we believe the lies others tells us because something in our heart agrees with them. It could be our insecurities. Possibly our feelings of inferiority. Whatever the case, something inside of our hearts agrees and we act accordingly. We must fight it! Bring truth into out lives. Thank you for sharing!

We all do suffer some pains in one form or another. You make so really good point on how to get through and grow from those situations. I do believe we should treat one another with kindness because you can’t always see the pain that someone is suffering or understand the effects pain has had on another.

My heart is happy with this comment. Thank you for sharing. Kindness is definately one of the most important thing we have to share with one another! That fact that pain is below the surface is excatly why we must treat people with that love and respect kindness demands. We may not always be able to see their pain, but it is there. Thank you for the comment.

It really is amazing, how much speaking out can change your life and your perspective on things. For me, speaking out about the abuse I’ve endured (in even the small way that I’ve chosen) has been such an enriching and freeing experience. I don’t even want to think of how my life might have ended up if I hadn’t found an outlet through blogging.

What I have found is when I am able to share my heart and my hurt I become free. Free from the bondage and darkness that it brings. Free from the heavy burden of keeping it all in. Having an outlet is a beautiful thing. One thing we must continually work with is our ability to communicate with one another and not just in writing about them. I was falling into that. My writing is my outlet as well, but I just did not tell her! Now, I am changing that.

It is always a blessing to hear that someone is speaking up! I know that it isn’t easy, but it is the best thing for our personal health. It is even a bigger blessing to hear that you are helping others! Thank you for sharing.

Oh, wow. This was really powerful to read, thank you. Everyone experiences pain and everyone experiences it differently – I think we should all remember that of ourselves as well as other people. You’ve no idea what others are going through, and they same back at ourselves too. Thanks for this.

You’ve hit on a lot of things that resonate with me so deeply. Especially the, “You cannot heal when you do not discuss.” I have a hard time opening up to others and a really difficult time always being able to identify the source of my pain or anger. I think the more open I become with my communication, the easier it will be for me to identify what’s triggered it.

I so agree with you! I would love to have a conversation with you and further this thought. There are certain “Life” events we have to evaluate to determine why we easily trigger in certain areas. Let me know if you would like to further the conversation.

This is a good post about feelings. Sometimes I am so busy I tend to sweep my issues under the rug – I know I shouldn’t. I will try to be more open with my family when I need that space to myself sometimes.

I like your perspective, but what I have found is what we don’t discuss doesn’t get healed. For example, I recently lost a friend over a simple issue. I was patient with him. Waited a bit for him to come around. Then when I tried to talk to him about the issue he decided that he didn’t want to be my friend anymore. I learned that hard way that time and patience may not be the only ingredient needed. It is definitely a main ingredient for healing, but not the only one. We need to learn to talk about the issues! Thank you for sharing.

Jim's mission in life is to help people taking their NEXT STEPS towards the life they truly desire. As a member of The John Maxwell Leadership Team, a military veteran, and a 15 year veteran of ministry Jim has the background and the ability to help you achieve your goals.